Learning for teaching: writing an autobiography

The only way to be able to teach something in life is to learn it first yourself. Autobiographies are a narrative genre that falls within recounts and historical genres. Although EFL students have an intuition of what an autobiography is based on their experiences in their first language, it is crucial to bring this genre into light in the target language, so that they explore its structure and elements in English.

 

This is what we have been doing in a Foreign Language Teaching course for pre-service Primary school teachers of EFL.

 

In so doing, students not only have learnt how to write an autobiography in an appropriate way in the foreign language, but also they have understood how they could teach such writing to their pupils in the future.

 

A popular autobiographiy to use with young learners of English is My First American Friend by Sarunna Jin